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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

WhatsApp-Facebook Post-Acquisition Scenario: Is Telegram the next big thing in mobile messaging app?

WhatsApp, the
leading messaging app with more than 465 million active users, is trying to
justify its multi billion dollars acquisition by the social-media giant
Facebook and promises to add free voice-call services by the start of second
quarter this year.

Telegram emerging as WhatsApp's biggest competitor

“We
are going to introduce voice on WhatsApp in the second quarter of this year,”
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum said on the opening day of the four-day World Mobile
Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The
29-year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, was the star
speaker on the opening day of the industry fair, announced a stock and cash
purchase of WhatsApp on Wednesday.

But
very few know right now that the other competitors of the WhatsApp have been
witnessing a sizeable increase of active users since the jaw-dropping $19-billion
deal last week. Other competing messaging apps like Telegram, TigerText and
Confide have been reported to have millions of new users during the WhatsApp
downtime.

Telegram,
a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, alone saw 8 million downloads
after Facebook tookover WhatsApp, reported by Tech Crunch.
The fact ultimately pointing towards the unsatisfactory attitude of users towards
Facebook’s own mobile messaging apps, which are specifically ranked lower than Telegram,
WhatsApp and even Snapchat in the App Store’s score chart.

Pavel
Durov, the founder of Telegram, has claimed that app’s growth rate has
increased three times since the WhatsApp acquisition. It has gone to touch one
million downloads per day from average of 300,000-400,000 downloads/day before
the multi-billion dollars deal.

Now
question is that in the wake of tough competition ahead whether WhatsApp will
prove itself a profitable deal for Facebook or this deal was just to defeat rivals
like Microsoft and Google.

On
Monday, the star speaker of the event Mark Zuckerberg defended the price paid
for a messaging service with negligible revenue. He maintained that rival
services such as South Korea's KakaoTalk and Naver's LINE are already
"monetizing" at a rate of $2 to $3 in revenue per user per year,
despite being in the early stages of growth.

On
the other hand, WhatsApp chief executive Jan Koum revealed the plans saying
that the WhatsApp voice product would "focus on simplicity" as it has
with its text-based messaging service. Tech gurus are expecting WhatsApp
revenue jumping 5 times in 2014 if succeeded to maintain the growth rate they
saw in 2013. Media reports suggest WhatsApp's revenue at about $20 million in
2013.